Western Digital Corp. today reported revenue of $3.8 billion, hard-drive shipments of 59.2 million and net income of $335 million, or $1.36 per share for its second fiscal quarter ended Dec. 28, 2012. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was $513 million or $2.09 per share.1 In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $2.0 billion, net income of $145 million, or $0.61 per share, and shipped 28.5 million hard drives. Non-GAAP net income in the year-ago quarter was $358 million, or $1.51 per share.2

The company generated $772 million in cash from operations during the December quarter, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $3.8 billion. During the quarter, the company utilized $146 million to buy back 4.2 million shares of common stock. On Dec. 3, the company declared a $0.25 per common share dividend, which was paid on Dec. 26.

"We are pleased with our December quarter results, reflecting outstanding execution and value creation by our HGST and WD teams," said Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer. "In an environment marked by continued macroeconomic uncertainty, soft PC demand and inventory rebalancing by our customers, we continue to manage our business by focusing on those variables that we control, allowing us to generate better than expected revenue and profitability and strong cash generation."

It sucks that everything consolidated down to two brands again. WD and Seagate. Samsung and Hitachi are just a different name of these two. Same crap happened with GPU's and also CPU's. It's so crap for the consumers and a heaven for fixing up prices to their desire. Argh. Thank god SSD's are the exact opposite of that with loads of vendors. Even if they provide essentially the same thing, it's still a competition which is good for us.

When two species occupy the same space and directly compete for the same resources you get competition and arms races up to a point, after which one winner eventually stands alone and all previous competing species are extinct or marginalized to a certain niche.

SSDs market is still relatively young and healthy, but I have no doubt it will eventually end up like the HDD market.

lol, in Europe and democratic countries in Asia, you cannot find less than 10 parties on each country..Also I bet that 50% of US guys don't know the difference between Dems and Reps, they are just voting for the louder guy... (Same everywhere to be honest...)